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Thursday, April 1, 2010

Holy Thursday @ Thunderbird Rizal

Since we had to plan ahead for a place to go to at Holy Week, and with Grandpa still at the hospital (before he passed away), we chose a nearby resort -- Thunderbird Rizal. Its part of an international chain of resorts. The Rizal branch is just about an hour from our house. So we figured, should anything catastrophic happen to Grandpa, at least we can easily come back. Of course, all of that is moot and academic at this point.

We had lunch at home first before heading out around noontime. Finding the place was not really difficult. I took the Cainta route instead of the Antipolo/Marcos Highway since I'm more familiar with that way. We arrived at the resort past 1pm.

Because the resort was fully booked the day before, the housekeeping could not cope fast enough to clean the rooms after checkout for the next guest to check-in. So we ended up waiting at the lobby for about an hour. All the other guests had to undergo the same hassle and people were constantly following up the front desk for the availability of their room. Mom, Dad, Nikki, and Allison arrived about half an hour later than we did, but they also had to wait at the lobby.

We finally got our adjacent rooms around 3pm. We were situated at the second floor facing the mountains and Laguna Lake in the far distance. Since it was really quite hot, we passed the time a bit and went to the pool around 4pm.

Ethan made big improvements. Even though he is still wearing his armband floaters, he was practically fearless in the pool. He would constantly go up and jump into the pool. When we last swam in Rockwell, he would be contented to wade by the shallow pool and would not even attempt to swim with the armband floaters. I don't know what he ate, but he's a completely new kid in the pool!

At night, we had dinner at the Chinese restaurant (no big surprise since the folks were with us). Food was pretty lame. Nothing to write home about. As part of our stay, we got a couple of P100 "free money" for the casino (yes, there's a casino in this resort). I tried it at the baccarat table and lost both coupons. I figure its not my lucky night so I did not add in real money, and instead, just went back to the room.